Here is a picture of my genoise cake with mocha buttercream:
Chef Rogers explained to us that covering the sides of the cake with something like toasted almonds, like I did here, is called in French, couvrir la misère, which translates to, "cover the misery." If you've ever tried to frost the side of a cake, you'll understand why that misery needs to be covered.
Today we did a total 180, transitioning from a week filled with sugar, butter and baked goods to a few lessons on nutrition. Makes sense right? Let’s stuff you with all the sugar and fattening baked goods you can eat and then tell you that you really shouldn’t have eaten that. For our healthful, nutritious recipe today, we made a sautéed striped bass with lentils and a horseradish vinaigrette. Sounds pretty healthy right? Well, it was “French” healthy…the lentils were cooked with bacon and finished with a dab of butter, but everything else wasn’t so bad. Everything in moderation, right? We had a refresher on how to fillet a whole fish, since we hadn’t done it for a weeks since our lesson in Level 1. Chef Jeff taught us a completely different way of doing it than Chef Nick did the first time we did it, so everyone was a little bit confused when they started filleting their fish. The bass we used were monstrous, and mine was extraordinarily bloody for some reason, leaving me with blood stains all over my uniform and hands. For some reason, I’m still not sure how it happened, I totally butchered my fish, I’m pretty sure it was missing the whole bone that we are supposed to base our filleting off of (I’ll just blame the fish, it definitely wasn’t any fault of mine), which left me with some mangled-looking bass fillets at the end, and still a lot of meat clinging to the fish bones. I quickly hid the evidence by throwing the bones in the compost bin and tucking my fillets in the back of the refrigerator, while I cleaned what looked like a crime scene on my cutting board because of all the bass blood loss. When our lentils and vinaigrette were assembled, we sautéed the fish briefly after rubbing it in curry powder and salt and pepper, then put out plates together, garnishing the whole thing with some crispy bacon and julienned radish. Here is the final plating of the dish:
Because we had a nutrition lecture in the afternoon from Chef Tim that wasn’t until 1:00, we had about an hour and a half lunch break, when we usually only get about 25 minutes. A bunch of us sat in the library after eating, pulling out cookbooks and showing them to one another, admiring the beautiful photographs and wishing we could make something as beautiful as what we were seeing. One of the things that I like the most about being in culinary school is being surrounded my like-minded people who are all as obsessed with cooking, cookbooks, chefs and new restaurants as I am. When we talk about well-known chefs like Michael White, Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, we talk about them like we know them, and we don’t have to bother explaining, “Michael White is the chef at Marea, Thomas Keller is the chef at French Laundry, etc. etc.” Sometimes when I talk about food or a new restaurant and I’m really excited about it, people look at me and probably wonder, “What is she talking about and why does she care so much?” For example, no one seemed to understand my obsession with trying to find an heirloom breed of turkey to cook for Thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure I convinced several people of my insanity just by trying to explain my reasoning for eating a breed of turkey that is on the verge of extinction. Yet at school, everyone understood immediately. It’s so nice that in school, we are all on the same page in how excited we are by food.
Yesterday, we made crepes, one savory and one sweet. The hardest part about it was making the actual crepes, and getting them to be the exact thinness and achieve the right amount of color that Chef Rogers was looking for. As expected, my first one was a total disaster, but after a few times of ladling in the batter and swirling it around the hot pan, I started to get the hang of it. I even got so confident that instead of carefully flipping the crepe over with a spatula, I flipped it up into the air and then back on the sautee pan…successfully! (Ok, so I messed one or two up, but those were just for practice). For the crepes suzette we made a compound butter with orange zest, orange liquor, and brandy and then folded the crepes into quarters and sautéed them with the butter to reheat them and to add more flavor. We plated them topped with the heated butter and some orange zest that had cooked in grenadine. They were delicious without being too sweet. Here is a picture:
For the ham and mushroom crepes, we made a batter with buckwheat flour, giving it a more nutty flavor. For these, we wrapped a ham and mushroom filling inside like a mini burrito and popped it in the oven to warm up. Here are my ham and mushroom crepes:
Later in the afternoon, we fried up our banana and apple fritters with a batter that was made bubbly and airy with beer. However ours ended up being a little thick and when our fritters came out of the fryer, they had little sticks pointing up all over them from where the batter stuck as we dropped them into the fryer. They looked like little alien fritters. After we cleaned up the kitchen and got everything ready to go, Chef Rogers, deciding he needed to do something with the 5 quarts of extra cream in the room, gave us a pop quiz. In 10 minutes, we had to whip up some cream chantilly (whipped cream with vanilla and powdered sugar) by hand and then pipe it onto a plate in an éclair shape. Panicked, we all ran around the kitchen like chickens with our heads cut off, grabbing the cream, then whipping it until our arms were about to fall off and finally piping it onto a plate, which were all warm from the dishwasher, which then melted my
carefully whipped cream chantilly! My “éclair-shaped” cream looked more like misshapen blobs after the heat from the plate melted them, but we weren’t actually graded on it, so I guess it turned out ok.
Anyways, today I was slightly missing the relaxing atmosphere that pastry provided for us the past week and a half. The kitchen was less chaotic, less rushed, but a lot cooler, temperature-speaking. But it was nice to pick up my chef’s knife again and start cutting up that onion, making the callous that I’ve developed from holding my knife regain its hard edge that was lost during a week of pasty. Tomorrow we continue with our nutritious recipes, making falafel (it’s fried, is that really healthy?), a watercress salad with grapefruit, and roasted spaghetti squash.
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